Poopsweeper

I took my dog for a walk today. The weather outside was a balmy 5 degrees, and I was well bundled. Two pairs of socks, snow pants, my warmest sweater, a long LL Bean coat, two pairs of gloves, I was good to go. I stepped out the door and instantly felt just how cold it was as the chill hit my face. And then I started walking. Or rather, I started trying to keep up with my dog, my eleven year old black lab/German Shepherd mix wearing nothing more than a dog collar. And he was trodding along, forgetting altogether that when he's inside, he looks to us twice before heading down to the basement, making sure that we are in fact heading down there. But outside, he was practically hopping through the deep snow. It was wonderful to watch, and totally made me forget the cold. In fact, walking across the unplowed sidewalks offered enough resistance that I actually started to sweat!

Anyhow, as I walked, Friday started sniffing a tree. Not so unusual, of course, but I had just read something somewhere about how trees and the whole tradition of sniffing and marking is a communication system for dogs. This article equated the trees as bulletin boards where dogs would learn about what is going on with the other dogs in the neighborhood and leave their own postings.

"So," I asked Friday, "who is that? Jasper? How are they doing?" Okay, I totally made up those names, but I couldn't think of any local dogs' names! "What are you telling them about you? You letting them know we let you have a pumpkin mini-muffin?"

We moved on. And I started wondering more about this bulletin board concept. Do dogs know when other dogs are in trouble? And when they bark at each other and insist on running across the street to meet another dog, are they actually trying to pass on important information to help someone? If we let them, would Friday and the dog down the street head off together toward a house two blocks away where the owner leaves his dog outside too long and doesn't feed him enough?

And before long, I was back home. I went to the backyard, to toss the plastic bag, and found that I had more to pick up.

About eight months after I got married and we were living in Columbus, my husband headed up to Cleveland for a 2 month med school rotation. I decided to join him, since I hated the job I had anyhow, and stayed at my in-laws' house. I signed up with a temp agency and waited for a call. It took a month before I finally got a job, but in the meantime, I kept myself busy playing minesweeper. I got to be pretty darn good at it, instinctively knowing which fields to flag and which to clear. The smallest size, I could complete in something like 6 seconds (or some other obscene number that's only attainable by someone with lots of time and little ambition).

Now, I know that defenders of video games argue that they do serve a purpose, that they help decrease reaction times and help minds process information quickly (among other things). Well, fast forward about 5 years, when we moved to Grand Rapids, and my husband managed to bust his ankle playing indoor soccer and put himself out of commission for about a month. Throughout the winter, which was very similar to our current conditions, with all the deep snow and chilly conditions, I was solely responsible for walking and picking up after the dog. Procrastination didn't serve me well when the snow would fall daily. By the time I would get outside to pick up my dog's excrement, I would discover that several droppings had been covered by snow.

Suddenly, my expertise at Minesweeper saved me. I detected the degree of discoloration of the snow at various points, carefully noting different mines at different depths. And when I finally recognized what I was doing, and gave the activity the name of poopsweeper, it made it more like a game than a chore (okay, maybe that's a slight exaggeration).

Final thought about my dog. We had Friday for 3 years before we had our first kid. Sure, it's popular to say that they're good "training" for kids. What a lie. No kid of mine got potty trained so young and so quickly, and I have yet to be able to leave a kid of mine alone at home. I say dogs spoil you and put you into a false sense of security.